Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  But not all of the gear in the room was obsolete: Jerry had a Cray PC more state-of-the-art than the one in Joan’s home office. The Betamax and eight-track machines were both hooked into it. “We’ll digitize the sound and picture and let the PC sync them,” Jerry said, powering up the computer. “Fun is fun, but manually cueing up an eight-track player without rewind or pause buttons is a pain in the butt.”

  They watched the video first, without sound, the Cray displaying the Betamax images on its monitor as it dubbed them to disk. Two men sat at a table in an elegant dining room, addressing a waiter whose blue tuxedo bore the Club 33 logo. One of the men, the moon-faced one on the waiter’s left, was familiar.

  “John Hoover,” Joan said.

  “John Edgar Hoover,” Jerry amended.

  Kite nodded. “Of course. I knew I’d seen him before.”

  “Hold on,” said Joan. “J. Edgar Hoover? The old F.B.I, director?”

  “The chief G-man,” Jerry agreed.

  “But that man there on the screen is John Hoover, the Disney technician who invented the Automatic Servant.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “I know the John Hoover you mean; I met him at Gant Industries once, before you and Harry got married. He didn’t look anything like J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “But we met John Hoover yesterday, and he did look like J. Edgar Hoover. Like that Hoover, anyway.”

  “Someone must have been playing a joke on you, Joan. I don’t even think John Hoover is still alive. He was already very old when I met him, and not in good health. He’d have to be in his late nineties by now.”

  “Well just to double-check,” said Joan, “J. Edgar Hoover is also dead, right?”

  “Oh yes,” said Jerry.

  “As a doornail,” Kite added.

  On the monitor, the two men closed their menus and gave them to the waiter; the screen faded to black. There was a cut to a close-up of a book order slip with entry spaces for title, author, and call number. The tip of a mechanical pencil entered the frame and wrote on the call number line: N.Y.P.L./171.303 607 949 6. The image held for about five seconds, then again faded to black, followed by static.

  “That was short,” Jerry Gant said. “Let’s try the audio.”

  He tapped out commands on a keyboard, spurning the Cray’s voice-recognition system. The video sequence replayed, accompanied by a fuzzy and unintelligible soundtrack; Club 33’s hidden microphones seemed to be on the fritz.

  “Who’s the man sitting with Hoover?” Kite asked. Thinner than Hoover, the man wore a spotless gray suit and had a scar on the bridge of his nose. “He’s famous too, isn’t he?”

  “That’s Roy Cohn,” Jerry told her. “The attack lawyer. Chief counsel to Joe McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. It’s funny he and Hoover would be dining at Club 33. Not that they couldn’t easily have arranged guest passes for themselves . . .”

  “Had either of them known Disney personally?” asked Joan.

  “Hoover did, I think. Walt was pretty staunchly right-wing, and he believed in supporting his local F.B.I.”

  “Can you understand what they’re saying?” Kite asked.

  “No,” said Jerry. “I’ll try and fix that. . . .” He stopped the replay by hitting a key, and typed: LOADRUN UN-BABEL 8T SOUNDTRACK ENHANCE.

  “What’s Un-Babel?” Joan asked.

  “Pretty much what it sounds like. It ungarbles garbled speech. Removes static and other background noise, minimizes echo, and if necessary makes an educated guess as to which words best match the pattern of sounds on the recording. I use it to decode backwards messages on old rock ‘n’ roll albums.”

  ENHANCEMENT COMPLETE, the Cray flashed on its monitor. MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS (A/B).

  “Hmm,” said Jerry. “This happens sometimes, when the recording is especially poor quality.”

  He typed: RUN BETAVIDEO W/UN-BABEL ENHANCEMENT A.

  “The gentlemen are ready to order?” the blue-tuxedoed waiter inquired. The gentlemen appeared hesitant, so the waiter continued, even as Cohn and Hoover both spoke up: “Perhaps I can suggest—”

  “Are there—” Roy began.

  “I’ll—” said Hoover.

  “—as your—”

  “—go for—”

  An embarrassed pause. The waiter looked apologetic, Cohn and Hoover annoyed.

  “You go,” Hoover said, gesturing impatiently at Roy.

  “No, please,” said Roy, with a disingenuous politeness. “You go.”

  “Fine,” said Hoover. He folded his hands, turned to the waiter, and said: “Gimme a bowl of the Berf-oh Pee-stow. Buttered corn biscuits. Buttered lima beans and asparagus, braised carrots, and mixed greens. For the main course I’ll take the Moaner Bluefish, maybe some rice with that. And I’ll also take some more wine.”

  The waiter nodded and turned to Roy. “And you, sir?”

  “I think I’ll go for the Vegetarian Chef’s Salad Number 33.”

  “And which of the dressings and toppings do—”

  “Ah, Thousand Islands,” Cohn said. “Sprouts and croutons.”

  “Very good, sir.” The waiter indicated Roy’s empty glass. “Would you like more gin and tonic?” Cohn nodded.

  “That’s all you’re going to eat is a salad?” Hoover said. “You eat like a fucking bird, Roy.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Roy, handing his menu to the waiter, “I can always pick out of your trough . . .”

  Fade to black, and cut to the book slip.

  “What’s Berf-oh Pee-stow?” Joan asked.

  “Bœuf au Pistou, I think,” Jerry Gant said. “Un-Babel has trouble with badly accented foreign phrases. It’s French beef stew, with an herb and garlic sauce.” He patted his stomach. “Fattening.”

  “And Moaner Bluefish?”

  “Probably Bluefish Meunière—floured and fried in butter, then drenched in more butter.”

  “Well, that seems to be the proper soundtrack,” Kite judged. “So what’s the other solution it came up with?”

  “Let’s see,” said Jerry. He typed: RUN BETAVIDEO W/UN-BABEL ENHANCEMENT B.

  Enhancement B was . . . different.

  “Generate executive order,” the blue-tuxedoed waiter said. The gentlemen appeared hesitant, so the waiter continued, even as Cohn and Hoover both spoke up: “Priority request—”

  “Author—” Roy said.

  “—iz—” said Hoover.

  “—ation—”

  “—code four—”

  An embarrassed pause.

  “Two oh,” Hoover said, gesturing impatiently at Roy.

  “Oh, three,” said Roy. “Two oh.”

  “Nine,” said Hoover. Then he folded his hands, turned to the waiter, and said: “Gimme a world full of perfect Negroes. Cull the born misfits; cull anomalies and disparities, stray arrows and miscreants. You may be forced to make a whole new blueprint, build up the race from scratch. Whatever it takes is fine.”

  The waiter nodded and turned to Roy. “And you, sir?”

  “I think I’ll explore the tension between fact and ideology.”

  “And you’ll be addressing this topic through—”

  “A thousand ironic . . . prosecutions,” Cohn said.

  “If you would, sir,” said the waiter, gesturing at Roy’s empty glass, “what do you mean by ‘ironic’?”

  “When your dearest beliefs prove invalid,” Hoover said. “Make them eat their fucking words, Roy.”

  “I will,” said Roy, handing his menu to the waiter. “I can pick on whoever you need offed . . .”

  Fade and cut. The mechanical pencil wrote: N.Y.P.L./171.303 607 949 6.

  “Hmm,” said Jerry Gant. “Hmm. Well.”

  “Play it again,” Joan said.

  15

  Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live with the truth. That’s what we’ll do.

  —Richard Milhous Nixon, accepting the
Republican nomination for president, 1968

  I want to be a horse.

  —Elizabeth II, age seven, on her plans for the future

  The Tribe That Isn’t Most People

  The Yabba-Dabba-Doo was ready for launch by sunset. Morris’s preparations for nonlethal warfare turned out to be a snap: all the supplies and equipment he needed were either aboard the sub or in storage in Pirate’s Cove, and he was already out on Liberty Island when Philo contacted him. The real chore was reassembling the rest of the crew, who weren’t answering their beepers. Lexa Thatcher and Ellen Leeuwenhoek shuttled around the city in their separate cars for hours, each chasing down six of the twelve missing pirates. Ellen needed a grappling hook to reach Norma Eckland and Asta Wills, who’d isolated themselves atop another abandoned lighthouse, this one at the tip of Coney Island; and when Lexa traced the Palestinian Kazensteins to the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan, their Aston Martin had just been towed, so all five of them, plus Irma Rajamutti, had to be shoehorned into the Beetle.

  By late afternoon, though, they were all at the Cove. On the Yabba-Dabba-Doo s missile deck, Morris loaded four yellow buoys into launch tubes while trying to ignore his Palestinian siblings’ pestering. Asta, Norma, Irma, Marshall Ali, Twenty-Nine Words, Osman Hamid, Jael Bolívar, and Ellen Leeuwenhoek were below, as was Seraphina, who’d hitched a ride out with Ellen intending to give a hero’s sendoff to a certain someone. Philo circled the pier, making a thorough inspection of the sub’s hull, his morning’s optimism replaced by a stone seriousness that was almost brooding.

  “Second thoughts?” Lexa asked. She walked beside him, her arm linked in his.

  “Thoughts,” Philo replied. He looked at her. “This is pretty nuts, this thing we’re about to do, isn’t it?”

  Lexa nodded. “Most people would probably say so, yes.”

  Philo nodded too. Then he said: “I was thinking about Flora. About ’04.” He squeezed Lexa’s hand. “You actually saw people die in the Pandemic, didn’t you? Saw it live, not on TV.”

  “I lost some good friends in the Pandemic,” Lexa said. “And when I wasn’t with them, I was out trying to report the story. With Ellen, until she got word that her lover was sick. And Joan, Joan was on the streets too . . . that was the same year her mother tussled with the pope, and she was back and forth between Boston, New York, and Philly all summer. She went out to Brooklyn on the last day of the plague, when the government finally started organizing relief services. She was in Bed-Stuy when it burned. Typical Joan—she nearly got herself shot by the National Guard.”

  “Mmm,” said Philo, “an experience I can relate to.”

  “What still amazes me,” said Lexa, “is the number of people who say they weren’t around for the Pandemic, or words to that effect—kind of like saying they were out of town during Noah’s flood.”

  “Well,” said Philo, “you know I wasn’t there.”

  “That’s different, though. That’s not what I’m talking about. You really weren’t in town for the Pandemic.”

  Philo had been at sea, in fact, for almost a year before the plague struck, crewing on a 100-foot corsair with an eco-posse of Rainbow Warriors. In a foreshadowing of Philo’s later career on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, the Warriors had boxed the compass rose of the Atlantic, sailing south to the Weddell Sea to harass a fleet of Japanese harvester ships that were illegally strip-mining krill, north to the Denmark Strait to haul in drift nets set by Icelandic fishermen, east and west in search of further wrongs to right in the Bay of Biscay and the Gulf of Mexico. In their own way the Rainbow Warriors were a lot like the Pennsylvania Dutch that Philo had grown up with: principled; hard-working; nonviolent; anti-industrial; thick-bearded; and reclusive. They had a shortwave radio on the boat but seldom used it except for weather reports and to get information on potential targets from their home base in Boston; their mail was forwarded to whatever seemed likely to be the corsair’s next port of call, but such predictions were often wrong, and the letters and packages usually had to be reforwarded several times. Hence Philo’s delay in learning that he had become a father.

  “After we graduated U. Penn.,” Philo had explained to Lexa, “Flora and I drifted apart and didn’t see each other for years. We met up again at an alumni picnic in ’03 just before I took ship, and . . . well, you can guess what happened. Pennsylvania was a red state then, very red—this was when they’d passed that law making it a crime to leave the state for an abortion, and there was a fight on to see whether that was constitutional. The Supreme Court’s ruling was due in two weeks, and it looked like it might go either way, so Flora figured she only had a few days to make up her mind what to do, with no way to get in touch with me. So she wrote me a letter as a substitute for the discussion we couldn’t have.”

  The letter had been mailed care of Philo’s old Philadelphia address; it eventually reached Boston, then visited Porto Alegre, Abidjan, Gibraltar, and Calais before finally catching up to Philo in the Faeroe Islands. By then the original postmark was ten and a half months old, with almost a full year elapsed since the fateful picnic. Philo read the half dozen closely written pages sitting on a bench outside the Nordic House in Tórshavn, did some quick mental subtraction, and realized that he’d been a daddy since May, early June at the latest. . . unless Flora had changed her mind after sealing the envelope.

  When a call to Philadelphia from the Tórshavn telephone office failed to go through, Philo rounded up the Rainbow Warriors and convinced them to set course at once for the Eastern Seaboard. It was a difficult crossing: rough seas and strong headwinds dogged them as far as the Grand Banks, slowing their passage, and midway through the journey a storm-tossed mug of herbal tea shorted out the shortwave. Deaf to the news of epidemic on the mainland, the Warriors pressed on, bypassing Boston to drop anchor in Delaware Bay. Philo packed a duffel and went up the Delaware River alone in a Zodiac, arriving at Penn’s Landing sometime after dark.

  In Philadelphia as in New York, there had been short-lived incidents of rioting in some of the plague-stricken neighborhoods, and the city was under curfew; but all Philo knew was that he couldn’t find a cab. When his Faeroese pocket change was rejected by the waterfront pay phones, he decided to hike the two miles to Flora’s apartment complex. Luck and ignorance combined to steer him clear of roving police patrols and National Guard checkpoints along the way.

  The power was off in Flora’s building when he got there. Growing alarmed at the lack of activity on the street—it wasn’t that late at night—Philo pounded at the lobby door for admittance. No one came to let him in, but his pounding soon broke the lock. He ran up the stairs to the fourth floor without encountering a single soul.

  The door to Flora’s apartment stood ajar. Philo found his daughter lying in an armchair beside an open window, loosely swaddled in her mother’s bathrobe. For an infant half-dead of hunger and dehydration, she looked remarkably content: she smiled at Philo and squeezed his finger in her fist, then waited patiently while he searched the rest of the apartment. Flora was nowhere to be found. Fighting the urge to panic, Philo carried the baby into the kitchen and hunted up a bottle, some formula, and a fresh diaper; he fed her, and bathed and changed her in the sink. Then he picked up the kitchen phone, which still worked, and dialed 911. He got two busy signals in a row and was about to try again when a police car cruised by outside, bubble lights flashing.

  And this is where the real nightmare began: Philo opened a window and shouted down to the street for help. The police cruiser stopped and disgorged four cops with riot guns. The cops did not see a confused father seeking aid for his child; they saw a big screaming black guy with a bomb-sized bundle in his arms. They emptied their riot guns at him. When he ducked back inside, they switched to tear gas canisters, and in short order managed to set the building on fire. Clutching the baby to his chest, Philo fled out the rear of the apartment complex; the police radioed the National Guard command post for the area and warned them to be on the lookout for a mad bomber.<
br />
  The return trek to the waterfront took most of the rest of the night. Streets that had earlier seemed deserted were now actively patrolled by armed men and women whom Philo had to assume would shoot on sight. At one point, crouching between cars in a parking lot to avoid detection by a helicopter, he spied a vanity plate that read SERAPHINA, and whispered the name in a singsong to his daughter to calm her. She liked it.

  Luck favored them. By dawn’s gathering Philo had regained the Zodiac; Seraphina slept snug in a box of survival gear while her father got them the hell away from shore. They made only one stop—a visit to the docks of the Franklin Seaman’s Club to siphon fuel from an unguarded yacht—after which Philo did not ease up on the throttle until Philadelphia was far behind them. He steered upriver, towards Trenton; though a seaward course would have felt safer, he knew the Rainbow Warriors were to have left Delaware Bay by now, and his first priority was to locate a newsstand with no troops around it and find out what was going on. It didn’t occur to him that the chaos they had just fled might exist in other cities as well, nor could he have imagined that he and his daughter were embarked on only the first leg of a long journey into exile. All he knew was that he was alive and wanted to stay that way, and that, barring word of Flora, he would not be returning to the city of brotherly love any time in the near future.

  “It makes sense, really,” Philo said now. Having completed the inspection of the sub’s hull, he rested his bulk on Betsy Ross’s front hood; Lexa rested on him, once more drawing his arms around her like a safety harness. “That I’d survive the plague and its aftermath, I mean—that makes sense. If there’s a story to my life, odd man out is it. Black Amish, who ever heard of such a thing? And then after I moved to Philly, swapped my adjectives around: Amish African-American—triple A, Flora used to call it—who ever heard of that?” He laid his chin on Lexa’s shoulder and stared at the Yabba-Dabba-Doo. “Do you suppose that might count for something, if worse comes to worst?”